Not Alessa
by miss selah
Summary: She was not Alessa. She was just about as far from Alessa as someone could get. [MovieVerse]


* * *

**Not Alessa**

* * *

She was not Alessa.

She was just about as far from Alessa as anyone could get.

They looked exactly the same, but that was Alessa's wish. Not hers.

If it had been up to _her, _she certainly wouldn't run around the ghost town in that disgustingly bright blue church dress that mocked her very exitence. But in Alessa's memories of herself, this god-forsaken cotton disaster was always what she was wearing, so she had no other choice.

The wardrobe was not something important enough to be worried with anyways.

Alessa thought that their pale skin was the same, because her eyes had actually stopped working months ago. She thought that they both had the same thick head of dark hear, held up only by a sloppy placed clip Alessa had insisted upon doing it herself when Dehlia had told them that they were going out. If she had known then that she would never be able to fix it again, she would have let her mother fix her hair one last time.

Fifty strokes was neat.

One hundred strokes showed you cared.

Alessa only brushed it ten times, and hurried out the door.

She wasn't sure what that meant.

They may have _looked _the same. But other than that, the two made night and day look similar. Alessa was a good girl, no matter what anyone said otherwise. She was so good, in fact, that she managed to summon up _her_.

She was not Alessa.

But she was the best that Alessa had.

* * *

She was _not _Alessa.

The moment Dahlia saw the child, burned and deformed in the hospital, she recoiled and became violently ill.

The child's flesh was burned and mutilated, by the hands of the people that Dahlia had come to know and trust. By the hand's of God's messengers.

The doctors had rushed in and ushered her from the room, because they couldn't afford to have the unidentified child be in an unsterile enviorment.

"Miss?" the dectective asked from behind her, drawing Dahlia's attention away from the child that was clearly not hers. "I asked, do you recognize her?"

For a moment, the child wheezed a bit harder on the oxygen tank, sucking life from machines. Her heart rate rose, just an iota, and Dahlia was so disgusted that she had to turn away before she vomited again, this time in a painted-white bucket that a nurse had set beside her just in case. It was a good thing she had.

"Miss?" The dectective asked again, handing her a ginerale to settle her stomach.

Dahlia sipped it carefully, grimacing as the foul tasting liquid rushed down her throat to settle her stomach. "No." Dahlia insisted, and pushed her way out of the corrider, careful not to make eye contact with the child that was looking at her so desperately. "That's not Alessa."

* * *

That _demon _was not Alessa.

She was spawn, and if Dahlia kept insisting that she was just a child, then Crystabella knew that it only reinforced her suspicions that Dahlia was a witch too.

Her husband argued with her, insisting that Dahlia was innocent, that she had no reason to be blamed for keeping the child's father a secret. He reminded her that maybe Alessa had been born from God's womb, and _that _was why she would not speal up.

But Crystabella knew better.

Because that was not a little girl called Alessa. It was a demon.

* * *

The little girl that she had first seen in the sterile white-room was not Alessa.

She had been a frightened girl, making desperate whimpers that the young nurse could barely make out as _mahmeeee. _She had been so curious, so desperate to help, that she had cast a glance at the little girl that no one was allowed to touch, for fear that they would make her ill.

Her eyes were red, and her skin was charred. Her fingers, which should have been immobile, thrashed frantically across the bedspread, twisting and coiling and ripping at her own arm, as if trying to remove the IV.

_She wants to die. . . _the nurse realized, and turned away. The sight of the little girl, no older than her own little sister, laying there alone and motherless, unwanted, was enough to make her weep.

"She wants to die, you know." A childish voice repeat her thoughts in a sing-song voice.

The nurse spun around. "What are you doing here?" She asked before she had seen her.

The little girl in the blue church chemise was smiling ever so prettily, her hair caught in a silver clasp. She rocked on her heels, and there was a skip in her step that made her walk look like a dance. She circled around the nurse, and peered through the small window that she had just looked away from.

"Don't look at her!" The nurse said grabbing her arms and spinning her so that she was facing her stomach. "You'll get nightmares!"

She couldn't see, but against her stomach, the pale child with dark hair smiled again.

"Nurse?" She asked, pulling back a bit so that she could look in to her eyes.

The nurse knelt down so that they were at eye-level, and placed her hands on the little girls shoulders. "How did you even get in here? Isn't your mother looking for you? She must be worried sick!"

The little girls smile stayed in place, a cold grin and sharp eyes. She brought her hands up to the nurse's face, and rubbed her cheekbones most affectionately. "Will you have nightmares from looking at Alessa?" She asked.

Just before she plucked out her eyes.

* * *

"You're _not _Alessa." Rose assured Sharon as she stared, mystified, at her own reflection.

"But I look so much like her. . ." No matter what she did, the girl-child-ghost-spawn couldn't get the image of her out of her head, the Not-Alessa staring at her with the same, curious eyes that stared back at her right now.

"But you're not Alessa." Rose insisted, one more time, and pulled Sharon off of the stool she was using to look up at her own reflection.

Sharon's head spun, and she looked at her mother with adoring eyes. "Well, then was _Alessa _Alessa?"

Rose hesitated for a moment, and tried to keep the confusion from her face. She knew that whatever answer she gave Sharon, she would trust completely, because she was the mother, and she was the expert on such matters. She knew that her answer would put Sharon at rest, no matter what it really was.

"No Sharon." She finally decided on. "Alessa died a _long _time ago."

Sharon frowned. "Then. . . am I Sharon?" She asked.

This time, Rose couldn't answer.


End file.
